The City and the Stage

Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws

Marcus Folch

Presents a systematic study of Plato's final statement on poetry, performance, mimetic art, and literary criticism

Brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of ancient philosophy

Advances a debate on the utility of speech act and performance theory in the study of Plato and other ancient authors

Encourages an ongoing reappraisal among Classicists of ancient philosophy in its historical and literary contexts

The City and the Stage

Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws

Marcus Folch

Description

What role did poetry, music, song, and dance play in the social and political life of the ancient Greek city? How did philosophy respond to, position itself against, and articulate its own ambitions in relation to the poetic tradition? How did ancient philosophers theorize and envision alternatives to fourth-century Athenian democracy? The City and the Stage poses such questions in a study of the Laws, Plato's last, longest, and unfinished philosophical dialogue. Reading the Laws in its literary, historical, and philosophical contexts, this book offers a new interpretation of Plato's final dialogue with the Greek poetic tradition and an exploration of the dialectic between philosophy and mimetic art. Although Plato is often thought hostile to poetry and famously banishes mimetic art from the ideal city of the Republic, The City and the Stage shows that in his final work Plato made a striking about-face, proposing to rehabilitate Athenian performance culture and envisaging a city, Magnesia, in which poetry, music, song, and dance are instrumental in the cultivation of philosophical virtues. Plato's views of the performative properties of music, dance, and poetic language, and the psychological underpinnings of aesthetic experience receive systematic treatment in this book for the first time. The social role of literary criticism, the power of genres to influence a society and lead to specific kinds of constitutions, performance as a mechanism of gender construction, and the position of women in ancient Greek performance culture are central themes throughout this study. A wide-ranging examination of ancient Greek philosophy and fourth-century intellectual culture, The City and the Stage will be of significance to anyone interested in ancient Greek literature, performance, and Platonic philosophy in its historical contexts.

The City and the Stage

Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws

Marcus Folch

Author Information

Marcus Folch is Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University. His published work includes studies of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and literary criticism, as well as classical reception in the 20th century.

The City and the Stage

Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws

Marcus Folch

Reviews and Awards

"Folch's is impressive because it demonstrates convincingly the central role Plato would give to musical performance. In particular he shows how it provides the psychological underpinnings for the institutions and practices described in the dialogue. In this way it does much to elucidate what Plato has in mind when he has the Athenian insist that every institution in the city must serve to promote complete virtue among the citizens." --Richard Stalley, The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition

"Folch's book is outstanding, full of original and exciting ideas. This is a major contribution to the field of classical studies." --Andrea Nightingale, Stanford University

"This sophisticated analysis elucidates how Plato's ideal community would transform musical performance into training for citizenship. Working with themes of genre and gender, Folch offers a lucid and stylish examination that relates spectatorship to civic identity, and makes persuasive correlations between aesthetic, ethical and political concerns in Laws." --Judith Fletcher, Wilfrid Laurier University